Booknotes from Our Staff

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton (Random House) Foodies, rejoice! Gabrielle Hamilton, chef and owner of the highly acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, has served up one deliciously riveting memoir. Beginning with childhood memories of her set designer father’s elaborate goat roasts, Hamilton takes us on a [...]

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Booknotes from Our Staff

Montecore by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, translated by Rachel Wilson-Broyles (Knopf) Structured as emails between Jonas, the Swedish-born son of a Tunisian émigré named Abbas and Abbas’s long lost best friend, Kadir, Montecore immediately endears its reader with its humor and linguistic bandying. Kadir urges Jonas to write the story of Abbas, and his rise to [...]

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Fear and Hope in the Search for Meaning

Religious practice continues to act as a pressure point in so many cultural contexts. Belief versus unbelief, accusations amongst traditions, the sort of bickering that results in societal fractures, deep and irreconcilable. For what, at its source, is meant to foster holistic living and goodwill toward mankind—hope, really—the level of animosity related to theology seems [...]

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Booknotes from Our Staff

Your Farm in the City: An Urban-Dweller’s Guide to Growing Food and Raising Animals by Lisa Taylor and the gardeners of Seattle Tilth (Black Dog & Leventhal) An exceptional new handbook for anyone who wants to become an urban farmer, this book includes everything you need to know about raising farm animals and growing food [...]

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Help Us Celebrate Our Anniversary

This is a few days late coming to the blog, but there’s still plenty of time to join us as we celebrate the anniversary of our move to Capitol Hill with this special discount coupon: https://www.elliottbaybook.com/files/elliottbay/ebbcoanniversarycoupon.pdf Just click the link, print it out and bring it in! Also remember to stop by the store to [...]

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Booknotes from Our Staff

The Iron Thorn by Caitlin Kittredge (Delacorte) The city of Lovecraft is a rational place, where science and reason are the law of the land, and religion and spirituality are the damned works of heretics. During the day all is well, but at night ghouls stalk the sewers while shapeless monsters writhe inside the stolen [...]

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Booknotes from Our Staff

Portraits of a Marriage by Sándor Márai, translated by George Szirtes (Knopf) This novel is so beautiful and complex. Set in Hungary between the wars, it is simultaneously an exploration of marriages and human relationships, the classes and class struggles, the nature of art and the nature of war, and the ways in which we [...]

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Jasper Jones: the New Mockingbird

Like many young adult authors writing today, Australian Craig Silvey owes a huge debt to Harper Lee. Just released in America, Silvey’s novel Jasper Jones pays homage to Lee’s Southern Gothic atmosphere in To Kill a Mockingbird, with its elements of small-town intolerance, sudden coming-of-age, and the juxtaposition of innocence and wickedness. But if Silvey borrowed from Lee [...]

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Booknotes from Our Staff

The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-five Minutes in History and Imagination by Javier Cercas (Bloomsbury) The moment in question is February 23, 1981—bullets fly through the air in the Spanish Parliament during an attempted military coup. Three men refuse to take cover and remain upright as they face the gunfire. With a novelist’s eye for [...]

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The Bewildering Business of Words

“To rescue the banal is every lyric poet’s ambition.” -Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks   In 1996, The Academy of American Poets baptized April as National Poetry Month. All over the country, anyone even remotely involved with the world of books now pays homage to poets and their exploits. Booksellers, publishers, teachers [...]

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